Gargadusa's Tower · published · build 24827422
The Hex Battle System goes live — every fight now plays out on real ground, with terrain, range and damage type deciding outcomes instead of a single power number. Plus Rival Guild Duels, Party Reservations, nine new battlefields, and a season's worth of quality-of-life.
A total of eight betas over the last two weeks all land together in today's Live patch and the headline is the one that changes everything else underneath it: combat is no longer a number against a number. This release carries the new Hex Battle System (HBS) from its first rough landing through two weeks of math passes, balance sweeps and bug fixes — alongside a new frontier to hold and the largest quality-of-life pass the game has seen in months.
All battle content now resolves on the fancy new hex battle system. New engine, new visuals, all new math. This is a legit massive improvement for the game overall and I am super excited to push it to the Live version. At first, things are balanced a bit on the easier/more forgiving side of things. That will change, but to start I didn't want us all to get hit by a truck. Over the coming weeks, I'll be tweaking and shifting things to get more in-line with my expectations, but for now, please enjoy the vibes. Combat used to be a number against a number. You sent a party, the party's power met the quest's difficulty, and a roll decided the rest. Where anyone stood was flavor text.
Every unit now holds a hex, has a range, and has to close the distance or hold the line. Quests, raids, tower floors, garrison skirmishes, Crown Cup bouts and Rival Challenges all resolve through the same engine.
The board and how units read it
29 battlefields and counting — deep marsh, ruined hall, terraced slope, river crossing, ember waste, boulder field, sunken ruin, crag pass, bone orchard, broken causeway, dune flats, mountain ledges, a pillared cavern hall, reed-marsh bog, rubble scatter, boulder garden and more — drawn by raid biome, quest region, tower band and garrison depth. Each layout has its own stone, water, high ground and choke points, so a ridge line doesn't play like a bog and a cavern hall doesn't play like open field.
Cover matters. A wall between a ranged attacker and its target cuts the shot by 25% per blocked hex, up to half.
Flanking pays. A basic attack gains +6% damage for every ally already engaging the same target, up to +18% at three.
Bogs come in three depths — shallow (6% max HP per round), standard (12%) and the worst (18%) — each painted differently so the cost reads before you wade in.
Every role reads the ground differently. Archers climb hardest, since they bank the high-ground bonus nearly every round from range. Healers never climb and avoid hazards better than anyone — they're the squishiest body on the field and the one whose death loses the fight, and high ground has never boosted a heal anyway. Tanks hold the anchor hex through a drain rather than dragging the line off it, and a unit already engaged while standing in a hazard steps one hex clear and still swings that turn.
Healers triage. When the ally in range is safe (65%+ HP) and someone else is dying (below 50%) out of reach, a healer crosses the field for the dying ally instead of topping off whoever's standing next to it. Live everywhere except the tower, which briefly kept the old behavior before also picking it up.
Damage is attribute-driven — attacker offense against defender defense, with diminishing mitigation — replacing the old overall-rating-gap formula everywhere. A class's offense now reads the damage stats it actually trains rather than a fixed pair by role: finesse melee (Rogue, Monk, Assassin, Mistwalker), pure casters, the Bard and the Beast Master were all fighting at a 15–27% discount against an equal-rated peer, and that gap is closed. Defense reads the best two of DEF, END, RES and DUR, so a resistance-built caster and a durability-built tank stop being dragged toward baseline.
Damage types resolve per hit: 1.4× into a weakness, 0.6× into a resistance, so counter-picking the party shows up in every blow instead of a pre-fight fudge. Raid warbands now fight as their boss's kin — the Lich King's host is undead, weak to Holy and Fire, resistant to Shadow and Arcane — and matchups decide raid fights outright: at parity against a lich-typed host, a Holy party averages a decisive win where a neutral party grinds to a stalemate and a Shadow party gets routed.
Every hit rolls ±15% variance and crit chance now scales with DEX, AGI and LCK — from a flat 10% up to roughly 22% for a true finesse specialist — instead of a flat roll.
SPD rolls a chance at a second attack each round, after the main exchange resolves.
Equipment finally counts in the fight itself. Quests, raids, tower descents and Cup bouts were resolving on bare stats while the party card showed the geared number; building and class bonuses now apply in combat too, and charged abilities that used to get folded into party power twice (or subtracted when they never actually cast) no longer distort a squad's real strength.
Tanks pull one hex closer by default but no longer wall off the whole fight, and a tank already engaged by two attackers stops pulling so the rest of the line can flank around.
Tanks can taunt in PvP bouts: every 15 rounds or so, everything within 3 hexes gets yanked back onto them for one round.
Mobile classes (Rogue, Assassin, Monk, Ranger, Bard, Lancer, Dragoon, Reaper and the rest) can path straight through a blocking line, though they still can't end a move on an occupied hex — and leaving or crossing an adjacent enemy's reach draws one free Attack of Opportunity, so slipping the line is a real trade rather than a free one.
Together, these ended the 20-plus-round tournament slap-fights: an even bout now resolves on the board about 57% of the time instead of 1%, and a clearly favored party kills through instead of grinding to a round-cap points decision.
Rival Challenge matches and Crown Cup bouts are both seeded from the deploying party, opponent and week — reload the same lineup and you get the same fight; a different lineup is a legitimately different one. Escape during either fight jumps straight to the result instead of forfeiting a win in progress.
Raid, quest, tower and garrison reports carry a Watch the Battle door — the same engine, replayed. A routine deathless fight opens on the report; a death, a first raid, a decade boss floor, or a critical failure opens in the arena first, then the finale, then the report as epilogue. A Battle Presentation setting (Always / Big moments / Never, in Settings ▸ Gameplay) controls this without ever gating the manual Watch door.
Click any company card for a hero's dossier — portrait, live HP and OVR, damage dealt/taken and healing given — or any foe for a focus card with its full illustration, alive/total count and per-unit HP. Every hit draws an arrow from actor to target with a ring on whoever got hit; heals draw dashed green, killing blows draw heavier.
The camera is controllable — zoom, drag-pan, scroll/pinch, and a reset button — and switches off auto-follow the moment you touch it.
Ultimates take over the screen: letterbox bars, a gold-edged sweep, the caster's portrait slamming in, the move's name landing over a gold rule, plus a Comms tab where your units call out the enemy, salute first blood and rally around the first fallen ally (flavor only — it changes nothing about the fight).
Garrison skirmishes now replay in the same spatial arena as everything else, with a roster rail, a grouped enemy order-of-battle, a momentum bar and a named Chronicle, and each skirmish gets its own record — two fights on the same floor used to share a slot and replay the first for both.
Casualties finally show up right. The hex board's DEALT/TAKEN/HEALED rail now agrees with the Battle Report's DMG/TKN/HEAL; a fallen hero is back in the Party Performance table with a skull and a struck-through name instead of vanishing; the tower's log names who fell, even on a floor already cleared; multi-party raid logs no longer drop a whole company's losses; and the tower's pre-battle forecast folds in the after-battle risk so a clean win no longer previews zero deaths on a floor that can still kill.
The biggest balance shift in this release, introduced mid-cycle and tuned every build since: every won quest, raid and tower floor now carries a small per-member death chance based upon the action of the fight (not just a flat X%), scaled by the content's threat and damped for overpowered parties (never below 0.35× of base). It runs through your existing mitigation, death saves, and the Lethality difficulty slider — Aegis of the Absolute still grants true invincibility, and a flawless critical success is never fatal.
Death saves now fire in the Tower too: Death Defier, Temple Divine Protection and a stocked Chirurgeon can turn a lethal blow into a critical injury on a floor fight, checked before miraculous survival and the Salvation Grimoire so those aren't wasted.
A hire in their first four weeks who takes a would-be-lethal blow survives with a critical injury instead of dying outright or being force-retired, and half their signing bonus is refunded if they still retire or die within eight weeks.
The Lethality slider's tooltip now says plainly what it multiplies: death chance on failed quests and rough wins with unmitigated setbacks. If you want a hard floor on every quest's risk instead, that's the separate Death Floor setting.
Cautious raid strategy, protective provisions and your injury/death-prevention buildings all affect raid casualties again — a 0.70 injury-risk multiplier really does mean 30% of selected injuries get spared, capped at 50%. The hard difficulty death floor stays un-sparable.
Rival Guild Duels: call out any NPC rival from their profile for a 750g purse — the same 5v5 hex bout the Crown's quarterly fixtures use, on your own schedule. Your guild carries an ELO ladder rating (1200 to start, five placement matches, then Unproven → Contender → Proven → Renowned → Peerless), rivals are rated off their OVR so they get harder as the season goes, and repeat meetings escalate stakes ×1.15 from the 2nd bout, ×1.30 from the 5th, ×1.50 from the 9th. The purse is spent on declaration and never refunded, a six-week cooldown and a twelve-declaration season cap fence off farming, and walking away from a declared match counts as a ladder loss. Each new season compresses your rating halfway back to 1200 and re-runs placements; grudges, record and peak rating carry over as history.
CCL Duels (early ELO): standings gain a sortable ELO column, your division header shows your rating and rank tier, and rivals now play simulated near-rating duels among themselves every week so the ladder is a live race rather than a snapshot of OVR. Rank tiers read Uncharted → Rising → Ascendant → Luminary → Zenith across every surface.
Strength of the Realm: a new season-long crown, awarded at the finals alongside the renown-based Crown Cup, naming the realm's highest-ELO guild. Champion pays 15,000g, podium 6,000g, your division's strongest 4,000g, tracked in a trophy strip on the standings. Online leagues get their own server-authoritative Guild Duel ELO, separate from renown and the CCL race.
Crown Cup is now a proper four-team single-elimination bracket — seed 1 vs. 4, seed 2 vs. 3, then the Final — with portraits, division, seed and party OVR on the tree, an "Up Next" flag, and every bout fought in the hex arena. A finalist's box score sums across both fights; MVP, All-Tournament, records and the coronation all read off the bracket. Rival-only semifinals can be skipped; the Final and any match you're in always play out.
Rival Challenge matches are now real hex bouts too, with 3 wager tiers (Friendly / Bragging Rights / High Stakes) that get disabled if you can't afford them, and an unaffordable wager on resolve is downgraded to Friendly rather than letting gold go negative.
Named ground. Every region carries towns and wildlands (working names, more art incoming) with quest markers clustered around them, and a toggle hides the labels and compass for a clean map.
Roads and seasons. Marches and supply caravans follow an actual road network instead of straight lines; summer opens boat routes, winter storms and frozen passes slow roads and raise risk.
Signature exports. Each region has goods tied to it, and a festering threat chokes them — prices climb and stock dries up in the city market until the threat is broken.
Direct assault. Instead of grinding a high-tier threat down over weeks of patrols, march on it directly — solo, or with up to two allied guilds.
Waystations, forts and bastions can be built out on the frontier to harden patrols, keep morale up, cut convoy risk and travel time, and give early warning of new threats. Your guild's tier sets how many regions you can hold.
Patrol events hit stationed parties with a 12% weekly chance of a region-flavored incident (wolves at The Bridge, webs in The Marshlands, something in the Eastern Workings' old galleries, smugglers on The Shallow Sea), rarer in ground you hold (×0.6) and more frequent in a rival's (×1.6). A clean repel pays +4 party morale; a costly one leaves the lowest-rated member with a 2-week minor injury. Frontier Wardens on station add up to +10% incident defense.
Holding ground pays: −25% quest difficulty on ground you hold, +15% on a rival's, and held regions draw 1.5× the weight when a new quest picks a region across the board, faction contracts, Crown contracts, alliance quests and hand-built quests.
Reading the map: a party card opens a full Party Detail view — roster, a themed scene for what they're doing right now, mission progress, orders, clear rate, chemistry and what the squad is saying about each other. Party coins now stand on the table like little painted standees, and taking a region plants a one-shot claim flourish.
Garrisons hold their own. Holding a garrison at even power is now a costly, contested fight — you're overrun below ~85% of the floor's power, and a clean repel needs ~115% — and fatigue, veterancy, outpost, manning and doctrine bonuses now strengthen the defenders in the skirmish itself, not just on the readout. The Tower landing page carries a "Your Holds" strip: front floor, company, fatigue band, manning and an amber flag when a hold is under-supplied, exhausted or under-manned.
Large bulk buys — market orders, tower provisions, garrison resupply — now arrive by caravan two weeks later instead of instantly, unless you've picked up the Merchant specialization, which keeps its instant bulk buys.
Train parties as a unit against practice dummies in the Hex Battle System in the Train tab.
Reserve a raid or a Tower descent while your parties are still out in the field: pick the full formation, and it launches itself the week the last party comes home. Reserved parties are held out of every automated path — quest and contract queues, gambits, commander directives, auto-training — and the raid board and Tower prep screen list parties that are merely "out" so you can stage from a scattered roster. A reservation releases itself if its bounty leaves the board, a reserved party is disbanded, or the formation fails to assemble within 12 weeks.
Gambits: give a party an ordered IF/THEN rule list — fully healthy, an injured/high-stress member, N quests in a row, or always, each paired with take-a-quest-within-a-risk-band / train for 1–8 weeks / hold-and-rest. A party under active gambits is driven by its own rules instead of standing-orders scoring, and rule sets can be saved as templates and applied to several parties at once.
Queue faction contracts per party, up to 10 deep, from the contract panel — they auto-accept in order as the party frees up, ahead of the commander's own picks, and re-check standing, favor, gold and contract caps first. Parties currently deployed can now be queued for their next contract while they're away.
New standing orders: Train when idle opens a 4-week auto-train window when nothing scores that week, and Rest if hurt holds a party home while a member is injured, resting, or at 25 morale or below.
Substitute toggles now drive weekly auto-deploy directly — quest, contract and joint-op directives bench anyone who can't march, pull in healthy spares (re-picking a captain if needed), and keep that lineup for the deployment. A single injured member no longer benches the whole squad, and the feed says by name when a party stayed home and why.
A "1 Tank/Healer" party toggle keeps single-role specialists out of the two Flex seats during Substitute, so high-OVR healers stop stacking into one party; hybrids like Tank+Healer can still take a Flex seat.
A party set to the Tactician's discretion now redraws its orders as it marches, so a lineup that changed after the order sheet closed doesn't deploy under stale orders.
Tag adventurers and parties — presets (Mentor, Top Performer, Keep, Sell, Bench, Project) or your own, up to 8 per entity — with automatic tags for Newbie (level ≤3) and Awakening (an ambition crossroads). Tags show on roster rows, filter the registry, and match in search.
Export the roster or your parties to CSV — full stats, contract, party, traits, abilities, ambition, tags and notes for the roster; members, average OVR and active synergies for parties.
Show or hide roster columns from a new Columns picker that persists across sessions.
A retired veteran stuck in a single-slot post (bartender, receptionist, quartermaster, treasurer, astrologer, tactician) can now be reassigned to any other open, unlocked post instead of being released, keeping their contract and tenure; reassigning them to scout, astrologer or tactician now correctly rolls a new specialization.
Non-crafting staff can go on paid training trips: Guild Workshop Study (4 weeks, +2–3 skill) or a Traveling Expert's Tutelage (8 weeks, +3–5 skill, 20% chance of only +1 on a bad trip). They're off-duty while away — and can no longer be silently reassigned mid-trip, which used to burn the tuition — and recalling one early refunds unspent tuition with no skill gained.
A Resource Ledger opens in the Workshop once you employ a Quartermaster or Treasurer: per-material inflow versus outflow over 4/13/52 weeks with a source breakdown on hover.
Right-click a roster row for quick actions — Recruit/Scout/Dismiss on free agents, Scout/Trade on rivals, Scout/Enroll on academy prospects — greyed rather than hidden when unavailable, and press D in the Registry to release or dismiss behind the usual confirmation.
Negotiation screens (new signings and contract extensions alike) now carry your commander's read on the recruit directly, and show how much gold your already-queued bids this turn reserve, warning if they exceed your treasury. A hiring freeze greys the Recruit button with a stated reason instead of doing nothing.
Guild Value Added is now one consistent number everywhere: gold earned plus quest bonuses, minus wages, injury costs, lifetime signing fees, training spend and performance-bonus payouts — career, season and rival tables all compute it the same way.
Ranked Contracts: quests and raids post a letter grade (F/D/C/B/A/S) instead of a raw number until your Scouting Post hits tier 3, and the grade is read off your scouts' estimate rather than the truth — a mis-ranked contract can genuinely happen. Raids now sit under the same intel fog as quests: bounty stats, risk and injury estimates all read the scouted grade.
Counter-Intelligence: incoming trade offers for a rival's adventurer carry a "Scout them" button that sends a free scout to size them up before you decide, pushing the offer's expiry out to cover the scout's ETA plus a week of grace. When the report lands, a start-of-turn prompt reopens the decision with OVR, age, potential and asking price.
Elite Talent Frequency, a new custom-difficulty slider (5%–100%), throttles how often A/S-tier potential (and, at half strength, B-tier) generates across both the free agent pool and Academy graduates, handing the removed chance down to lower tiers. "Free Agent Quality" is renamed Free Agent Pool Quality and now states plainly that it governs walk-in applicants only.
Staff, crafter and gatherer applicants now respect the same renown-gated potential as adventurers (A-tier needs 500 renown, S-tier 2000), and the levers that were supposed to shape them — Free Agent Pool Quality, Noble Court, faction bonuses, Exclusive Contracts, Elite Talent Frequency — actually apply to that roughly one-in-five walk-in who isn't an adventurer.
Academy graduates now sign 3-year entry-level contracts instead of the 1-year minimum, so a late-Winter graduate doesn't expire within weeks; a released graduate enters the free-agent pool asking a real market wage priced off OVR, potential and age instead of a flat ~100g.
Academy-only runs certify at half the usual renown requirement per tier, and signing a graduate in that mode grants a small renown bonus (5 + 0.3 per OVR point). Special Training and Push Harder no longer sink a trainee's career-track odds and their gains now respect category ceilings instead of pushing toward a flat 99; a "Train All Qualifying" button applies Special Training to every eligible prospect at once.
Veteran crafters roll higher now — 60–95% of their potential ceiling on arrival instead of 25–85% — and training commissions pay more across the board: 60/110/190 renown by tier (up from 50/90/160), plus new gold rewards (1,500/3,000/6,000) and standing/trust with the ordering party.
The Deepforge tab is rebuilt: a masthead over two columns, a standing meter that names what each band unseals, services in a two-up grid with live fee/scope/cadence numbers, commission tiles with real gear art, a right rail for Brunnhilde's letters and the Forge Log, and a three-state Gear Autopilot switch (Off/Part/On).
Reforge is now a re-roll, not a no-op: sacrifice one quality tier to roll a crafted item's base stats fresh, keeping improvements, synergies and specialization intact and restoring full durability. Crafted gear only, F-Tier excluded, cost named up front.
Reorder the crafting queue with ▲▼ arrows per job; a job already underway stays locked at the front.
The Compendium tab wears a discovery badge — an amber count of recipes still left to find, gone entirely at zero — and the Experimental technique now says plainly that discovery only reveals recipes early, since everything also unlocks through tower, quest and Crown progress.
Reserve an equipped item and it never loses durability on quests, keeping its stats and soul bond while Strip All, Optimize and the weekly auto-upgrade all leave it alone. With no slot-matched specialist on staff, your best available crafter can now emergency-patch gear at half repair efficiency.
Tower battles now wear equipment. Surviving fighters take durability damage scaled by floor depth and outcome, broken gear unequips (repairable at the Blacksmith), broken relics shatter into fragments, and the feed names what took the beating.
A lifetime Guild Historian tab in the Registry tracks confirmed kills by enemy family (Undead, Beasts, Humanoids, Constructs, Dragons, Elementals, Aberrations, Fiends, Fey), your guild's champion slayer of each, and a Realm Slayers top-25 leaderboard ranking your heroes against every rival guild's. Every real kill is credited to the hero who landed the killing blow, filed by family — separate from the old contribution-based kill count — and hero dossiers show a Slain record tile.
The Bestiary Codex records every creature you've fought — times slain, adventurers it's felled, the OVR range you've seen it at, regions sighted and week of first contact — fogged as "not yet catalogued" until first sighting. The clicked-enemy card is now a full dossier: combat class, danger rating, elemental weaknesses/resistances and its complete skill list with the ultimate marked.
The Star Chart Ledger gains Group (Constellation / Party / None), Sort (Urgency / Name / Progress) and Show (All / Actionable / Near & Urgent) controls, with bench heroes grouping under Unassigned.
Multiplayer trading moved into Markets under a new 🌐 League tab — offers inbox, stockpile-driven proposal composer and fairness meter all live there now, and the Tower's "Supply the Front" button and the League Lobby both route straight to it.
Protected league saves: a save slot holding a league game wears a Multiplayer badge, deleting one is a click from the Load screen, they're capped at the 10 most recent by campaign progress, and they're discovered by scanning the save folder so a league game still shows up even if local settings are wiped.
Lobby standings gain a Duels tab — ranked by win/loss differential, then wins, then Elo — with per-guild match history (result, week, wager, both parties' average OVR, damage dealt vs. taken) on expand.
A named league shows its name at the top of the lobby, and turn alerts now correctly name the league they came from instead of your own guild.
Reliability and integrity: turn notifications now work for leagues created or joined from the main-menu Multiplayer screen (not just mid-campaign links); a hung turn poll times out after 15 seconds instead of stalling notifications; quitting between Ready and week-resolution no longer double-applies market orders or resends orders that already went through; a crash mid-week no longer carries a staged market/pool/division state into the next week; a kicked player stops getting turn alerts; and a league you just joined can no longer be silently deleted from your saves when another league ticks.
Anti-tamper hardening: malformed enemy difficulty in a submitted battle now resolves to maximum difficulty and a guaranteed loss instead of a free win; a tampered client can't declare its whole party death-proof; contested signings can't be won with a forged upfront cost; unknown material keys are dropped instead of polluting the shared market; league world seeds are generated server-side so a founder can't precompute co-op rolls; join codes for private leagues are no longer published on the public stats page; and league/guild/letter/taunt text now strips invisible and direction-control characters so nobody can spoof lobby UI.
The full 21-track soundtrack is in the game. Battle music is now assigned per context — the tower keeps its theme, Crown Cup draws from two dedicated tracks, quest/raid/garrison fights get their own battle music — and the background playlist shuffles instead of cycling in a fixed order.
Desktop custom portraits: a Settings → Customize tab lets you drag a folder of PNGs onto a drop zone (or drop files straight into the portraits/pool/ folder) with live "N added, M skipped" feedback; class-tagged subfolders or -ClassName filename suffixes bias which adventurers draw them.
Translations landed across the Online Leagues screens (lobby, standings, duel history, host controls, sync panel, dispatches), the Bestiary's danger ratings and "first recorded" line, and Russian material/contract text throughout.
Roster rails, focus cards and rival guild profiles picked up a matching visual pass: class-rarity-tinted class lines, a team-colored ground ring per unit on the board, charge/cooldown indicators on ability icons, and a masthead-and-tabs restyle for rival profiles to match the adventurer dossier.
Class identity, spelled out above under the Hex Battle System, is the headline balance change of this release — offense reads real trained stats, defense reads the best-two of four stats, and crit finally rewards finesse builds.
Dual-class members satisfy every role they carry. A Tank/Healer in the healer slot no longer trips the "No Healer" penalty or the recklessness multiplier, and correctly fields as a Healer in the Crown Cup's healer slot.
Top Performer, MVP, Hero of the Day and raid standouts weight role output by OVR, so a sub-60 healer can no longer top a party of 100+ heroes, and tanks are credited for damage absorbed (scaling with defensive stats) instead of being rewarded for taking more hits.
A hired Tactician's skill now actually scales Strategic Focus (1.2× at 75 skill, 1.5× at 90) on tower assault power, quest gold and raid gold — every one of those channels had been using the no-Tactician baseline of 50 regardless of who you'd hired.
Dense terrain breaks stalemates. Fights that used to grind to the round cap on open ground now resolve, and a walled-in fight at even strength turns more wins pyrrhic — you take the field, but you bury people.
Enemy counts came down to match real damage output: quest packs are roughly half their old size, garrison reclaim waves field 6 bodies instead of 13.
Drilling idle adventurers now banks a Training Focus charge toward the instructor's specialization on top of its usual XP, and completing a program in a hero's own class (or under Focused/Disciplined) grants +1 Focus charge alongside the XP bonus.
Crown Contract Enhancements: three contract tiers (Standard/Elite/Sovereign) feeding a Requisition Shop and standing milestones, all now fully wired through the Crown Administrator panel.
Treasurer moved to Treasury Tier 1 — every guild needs one from the moment it has a Treasury, down from the old T2/T3 gate — and Treasury T3 now grants 2% Annual Interest plus a 500g Golden Reserve floor.
Rival material offers arrive about half as often at every trust tier, capped at one caravan offer a week below trust tier 8; and higher difficulty presets no longer inflate territory presence beyond their intended competitive bump.
Right-click a faction pill on the Quest Board to hide that faction's postings from the All view, with a chip showing what's muted and a one-click clear. Public/alliance work and pinned hero/party quests are never hidden.
Settings search now finds Battle Presentation, Fullscreen, Portrait Status Pins, End of Week hints, Force X11 and the Rebalance Ruleset by name or synonym ("arena", "auto open", etc.).
A trailing ? on the tab strip opens Sage's Wisdom straight to the guide for the tab you're on; the Sage's Wisdom library itself is now the first Founding Task.
Routine Front Desk notices roll up into a single digest, the Week Summary gives raids their own section and shows what your artisans auto-refined that week, and tower level-ups now list stat gains in the end-of-week review the same way quest level-ups already do.
Zoom on the battle board reaches further out (0.4×–2.4×) so the whole fight fits on screen, and the numbers font slider now resizes tabular figures — league standings, damage boards — that it used to skip.
Quick-buy buttons on the Quest Board, Tower provisions and garrison resupply now warn you up front when an order is large enough to arrive by caravan weeks later, instead of taking the gold silently.
The Sage's Wisdom guides, tooltips and confirmation dialogs got a broad clarity pass: Training Focus explains that it biases future level-ups rather than granting stats on completion, the Lethality slider states exactly what it multiplies, Free Agent Pool Quality states what it does and doesn't cover, and building descriptions now name the gatherers they unlock instead of a generic "unlocks gatherer roles."
Your Commander's trust can no longer be farmed by applying an optimizer suggestion, reverting the party by hand, and reapplying — trust now moves once per standing recommendation and never for a swap the Commander never asked for.
Gear returning to the armory from a dead, sold, traded, poached, released or expired adventurer now clears its lock and reserve marks — a reserved piece was staying permanently immune to wear, and a locked one kept getting skipped by Strip All while sitting on nobody.
The memorial now records gear-as-worn for raid deaths, matching how it already worked for quests, the tower and the Grimoire, and a practice battle correctly uses your current parties, Tacticians and materials rather than a stale snapshot from when the screen opened.
Selling gear pays what it should. The Market tab now applies your Marketplace sell-price and loot-value bonuses, the Auction House rare-sell bonus, and Black Market Contacts' 2× on Rare/Epic/Legendary — and every sell price you can read (Armory, Market list and detail, bulk-sell totals, the confirmation) now shows the bonused amount up front. Selling an Epic or Legendary through the Market now correctly awards Prestige Lots renown to match the gear tab.
Quitting to the main menu after loading a Multiplayer save no longer overwrites a numbered slot belonging to a different guild, and starting a new game no longer touches protected league saves.
Sealed bids and enrollment claims can now be withdrawn cleanly: the "Sealed Bid Submitted" letter clears with the withdrawal, and withdrawing no longer gets refused just because an earlier order for the same recruit was already sent.
The Crown Cup bracket and Rival Challenge fights no longer crash on a party with two or more members past the first — both surfaces also fall back to the older resolver if resolution ever fails again, rather than stranding you on the party screen.
Construction event options with a gold cost you can't afford are now disabled and labeled with the shortfall, instead of draining your treasury to zero and still granting the bonus.
Divine Intervention has been fixed.
Fallen heroes stop reading as alive-then-dead. Casualties on quests and raids now fall in the battle log and Watch playback at the actual round they were lost, instead of fighting to the end and only appearing in the casualty list afterward; a young adventurer forced to retire after a near-fatal quest gets a dedicated "A Brush With Death" screen instead of the old age-retirement framing.
The boss health header stays on screen through ability and ultimate cut-ins instead of vanishing mid-fight, and a battle report carrying a corrupt or incomplete replay now opens report-only instead of crashing the arena.